Synopsis

Amateur film shot by Major William Rhodes James while serving with the 1st Battalion 6th Gurkha Rifles in Malaya during the early period of the Malayan Emergency, from August 1948, aiding the civil power and supporting the police in their search for Communist Terrorists (and with voiceover recorded by cameraman in July 2001).

Amateur film shot by Major William Rhodes James while serving with the 1st Battalion 6th Gurkha Rifles in Malaya during the early period of the Malayan Emergency, from August 1948, aiding the civil power and supporting the police in their search for Communist Terrorists (and with voiceover recorded by cameraman in July 2001).

Reel 1: Can marked "Operation Pintail [July - September 1949, Perak, Kedah], rafting, capture of flags, clearing of Bukit Kachi." Gurkha soldiers under British officers oversee clearance of inhabitants from Chinese village in Malayan jungle and their removal to a detention camp as a reprisal.; elderly Chinese men as well as women and young children leave the village on foot, laden with their belongings. View from top of mountain range, with displaced Chinese passing in foreground. Gurkhas cross shallow river. British military vehicles. Chinese family stands waiting, looking anxious. Pan over cleared village, where British officer and Gurkha soldiers emerge from hut (presumably having checked for any remaining villagers); children stare at the camera. Gurkhas cross river in flat-bottomed boat; others are propelled downstream by Chinaman navigating with pole. Onto far bank. Gurkhas (or local Malay levies?) with leggings rest by river. Erection of canvas tent in jungle. Malays propel raft across river.

Reel 1: Can marked "Operation Pintail [July - September 1949, Perak, Kedah],
rafting, capture of flags, clearing of Bukit Kachi." Gurkha soldiers under
British officers oversee clearance of inhabitants from Chinese village in
Malayan jungle; elderly Chinese men as well as women and young children
leave the village on foot, laden with their belongings. View from top of
mountain range, with displaced Chinese passing in foreground. Gurkhas cross
shallow river. British military vehicles. Chinese family stands waiting,
looking anxious. Pan over cleared village, where British officer and Gurkha
soldiers emerge from hut (presumably having checked for any remaining
villagers); children stare at the camera. Gurkhas cross river in
flat-bottomed boat; others are propelled downstream by Chinaman navigating
with pole. Onto far bank. Gurkhas (or local Malay levies?) with leggings
rest by river. Erection of canvas tent in jungle. Malays propel raft across
river. Note: Operation Pintail was one of a number of operations which were
intended to prevent the Malayan Races Liberation Army No. 5 Regiment escaping (possibly to the border
with Siam?) from operations in northern Pahang and Kelantan which had driven
them north. Bukit Kachi is in north Kedah.
Reel 2: Can marked "Operations near Bahau [Negri Sembilan], 1950?". Gurkha
soldier cuts banana palm with kukri (for roofing?). Gurkhas cross shallow
river by foot. Extended sequence in jungle (strong light and shadow
contrasts beneath jungle panoply). Members of 1st Battalion pose holding
three captured Communist flags (red background, with yellow stars and hammer
and sickle); group also includes Malays (trackers?). Gurkhas swim in
fast-flowing river. Gurkhas and their supplies (on separate rafts,
manoeuvred by Malays) travel downstream through white water rapids before
reaching calm stretch, then more rapids, where Gurkhas navigate. Gurkhas in
armoured cars. King coconuts are cut from palm for drinking. Gurkha patrol
moves through jungle (brief shot of RAF supply plane passing overhead), then
through chest-high grass in clearing, then along road past rubber plantation
before climbing into British military vehicles. Wide variety of transport,
including Army ambulance, at Vehicle Park.

Reel 2: Can marked "Operations near Bahau, 1950?". Gurkha soldier cuts banana palm with kukri (for roofing?). Gurkhas cross shallow river by foot. Extended sequence in jungle (strong light and shadow contrasts beneath jungle panoply). Members of 1st Battalion pose holding three captured Communist flags (red background, with yellow stars and hammer and sickle); group also includes Malays (trackers?). Gurkhas swim in fast-flowing river. Gurkhas and their supplies (on separate rafts, manoeuvred by Malays) travel downstream through white water rapids before reaching calm stretch, then more rapids, where Gurkhas navigate. Gurkhas in armoured cars. King coconuts are cut from palm for drinking. Gurkha patrol moves through jungle (brief shot of RAF supply plane passing overhead), then through chest-high grass in clearing, then along road past rubber plantation before climbing into British military vehicles. Wide variety of transport, including Army ambulance, at Vehicle Park.

Notes

Summary (Reel 1): Operation Pintail was one of a number of operations which were intended to prevent the MRLA No. 5 Regiment escaping (possibly to the border with Siam?) from operations in northern Pahang and Kelantan which had driven them north. Bukit Kachi is in north Kedah.

Summary (Reel 2): Bahau is in Negri Sembilan; operation may be part of "Operation Jackpot"

Context

Issued in May 1950 by the newly appointed Director of Operations in Malaya, Lieutenant-General Harold Rawdon Briggs, the Federation Plan for the Elimination of the Communist Organisation and Armed Forces in Malaya (CAB 21/1681, MAL C (50)23, Appendix, in Stockwell ed. 1995: 216-21), commonly known as the ‘Briggs plan’, marked a major change in the security approach to the Communist insurrection.

The report is frequently credited with turning the tide in favour…

Issued in May 1950 by the newly appointed Director of Operations in Malaya, Lieutenant-General Harold Rawdon Briggs, the Federation Plan for the Elimination of the Communist Organisation and Armed Forces in Malaya (CAB 21/1681, MAL C (50)23, Appendix, in Stockwell ed. 1995: 216-21), commonly known as the ‘Briggs plan’, marked a major change in the security approach to the Communist insurrection.

The report is frequently credited with turning the tide in favour of the British authorities and security services during the initial years of the Malaya Emergency. Central to this reputation was Briggs’ comprehension that not only was the severing of the MCP/MRLA (Malayan Communist Party/Malayan Races Liberation Army) connection with the rural Chinese ‘squatters’ a priority, but that this disruption of supply should be understood as part of a campaign to win the confidence of the landless rural Chinese and bring them within the ambit of Government. This was to be done by providing a program of forcible resettlement combined with the provision of ‘effective administration e.g. schools, medical and other services’ (ibid.: 218). Such resettlement and social provision would both cut MCP supply and eventually, it was hoped, open up new channels of information for the police and army as they continued to prosecute the war in the jungle. The military aspects of the plan were also effectively a new start, involving a full-scale redeployment of troops in order to eradicate the Communist presence state by state from the South to North of the country, starting in Johore. The central plank however was the order for the comprehensive program of removals (‘a large measure of squatter resettlement into compact groups’), and under this aspect of the Briggs plan over half a million Chinese were eventually relocated to so-called ‘New Villages’. Overall the plan was, according to Ramakrishna, ‘the concept for eventual victory’; for Clutterbuck, it straightforwardly ‘won the war in Malaya’ (Ramakrishna, 2002, 89; Clutterbuck, 1967, 57).

It had long been understood that the rural Chinese supplied the guerrillas with food, manpower and information, and that if they could be removed then the MCP and its armed cadres in the MRLA – which had no robust material support coming from outside of Malaya – would be isolated. But in recognising that the information and support provided by the squatters was an essential resource in determining the conflict, the Briggs plan altered official strategy regarding the squatters, and sought to bring them into alliance with the Government.

In Briggs’ view, the squatters were not only to be sternly warned against cooperating with the guerrillas – the Briggs plan suggests a mandatory death sentence for any convicted ‘bandit food agents and money collectors’ – but also protected from them. The squatters needed ‘confidence in the ability of the forces of law and order to protect them against gangster Communist extortion and terrorism,’ and only with this security would ‘confidence and information … be restored and maintained’ (Stockwell op. cit.: 217). The resettlement program thus hoped not only to disrupt MCP supply, but to offer the rural Chinese some economic and social security from what were now cast as criminal Communist depredations, rather than simply punishing them for their involvement with the MCP.

This more considered strategy for dealing with the Chinese squatter population should not be regarded as a new recognition of their central importance in the overall Emergency security picture. It was more a change of emphasis: Briggs saw an effectively coercive plan for the squatters as a necessary element of the solution to the conflict. Prior to his report they had certainly been considered crucial, but they had essentially been regarded as a fifth column if not actually coterminous with the enemy, and action toward them had been fundamentally punitive and belligerent. Indeed, the resettlement program had been foreshadowed by several repressive Emergency Regulations such as ER17D, brought in during January 1949, which allowed for the mass removal, detention and deportation of squatters in any area that had been adjudged to have assisted the Communists, or even simply withheld information from the authorities (Ramakrishna, op. cit., 66; Harper, 1999, 174). The Briggs report itself gives a figure of 10,500 detainees awaiting deportation as of May 1950, and indicates that this number was increasing by around 350 per month (Stockwell op. cit., 220).

An internal telegram sent by Sir Henry Gurney, the newly appointed High Commissioner in Malaya, to Arthur Creech Jones, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in late October 1948 gives a good idea of what had previously been the prevailing official line concerning the squatters: ‘All my advisers are in unanimous agreement that we must make an immediate and serious attempt to deal with alien Chinese squatters who are providing bases from which bandits operate and are helping them, in some cases under duress and in many others willingly with food, arms, money and other means of resistance to our Forces. These people are a positive and formidable menace to security and a fundamental obstacle to the re-establishment of settled conditions…. I and my advisers are satisfied that the only answer to this problem is to require dangerous alien elements to leave the Federation’ (CO 717/167/52849/2/1948, ff 108-10, in Stockwell ed., 77-8). Gurney notes that even at this date, just a few months into the Emergency, some 3800 squatters were already detained pending expulsion under an earlier iteration of ER17. In this initial (and largely unsuccessful) stage of the war these settlers of the jungle fringe were regarded not as people on whom the law and civic society might be imposed, but as a dangerous swamp to be unceremoniously drained by the security services.

Analysis

The two reels of ‘Operations…’ contain footage of at least two distinct operations during the early phase of the Malaya Emergency. The combined reels are augmented with a descriptive commentary added by Major Rhodes James in 2001. Although the voiceover indicates Major Rhodes James could not positively identify the operations shown, writing on the can of the first reel indicates that it may contain footage of Operation Pintail, one of a number of operations that took place in…

The two reels of ‘Operations…’ contain footage of at least two distinct operations during the early phase of the Malaya Emergency. The combined reels are augmented with a descriptive commentary added by Major Rhodes James in 2001. Although the voiceover indicates Major Rhodes James could not positively identify the operations shown, writing on the can of the first reel indicates that it may contain footage of Operation Pintail, one of a number of operations that took place in Perak and Kedah states between July and September 1949. Pintail, with other concurrent operations (Widgeon, Pathfinder and Overall), was intended to help seal the Thai border to the 300-strong No. 5 Regiment of the MRLA, who were retreating under pressure from operations in northern Pahang and Kelantan (Jackson 2008: 30; Major Rhodes James indicates that he and his troops were stationed near Jitra on the Thai border in the extreme north of Kedah, which fits with the location and purposes of Pintail). The second reel, marked with ‘Operations near Bahau?’, may show operations that took place in early 1950 in Negri Sembilan, possibly during ‘Operation Jackpot’, a large scale series of actions in the state during January-May 1950 that involved ‘five Gurkha and British Infantry battalions, one Field Regiment, Royal Artillery and some sixty Police jungle squads’ (Oldfield 1953: 16). The operations were intended to ‘drive the enemy, dispersed over a wide area, into a comparatively small one in which they could be destroyed’ (ibid.: 12). It was not a notable success, and was abandoned before its final stage (ibid.: 9-17).

The film opens with the clearing by police and Gurkhas of a squatter village, Bukit Kachi, located in the far north of Kedah; maps from the period locate it at very the end of the roads traversable by vehicle. Major Rhodes James’ commentary on the events captured by the film is revealing: he describes the action as a ‘reprisal’ for an earlier, deadly ambush of his unit which resulted in several fatalities, and notes that the reason there are no young men to be seen as the villagers are rounded up is that ‘most of them are with the CT’s [Communist Terrorists] in their jungle base’. The people are being taken to ‘a detention camp’. The sequence is followed by some scenes of Gurkhas on a jungle path and crossing a shallow stream by foot, before returning to village searching scenes. Major Rhodes James comments that the searching villages was a ‘hopeless task’ as the local villagers were ‘under the control of the Communists in the jungle, and they had to do what they were told’ and mentions the Min Yuen(‘Peoples Organisation’), theCommunist network of civilian suppliers and informants. After some scenes of jungle travel and river crossings, there is a sequence of armed Chinese irregulars who are travelling with Rhodes James and his Gurkhas on this operation – his commentary identifies them as Kuomintang (Chinese nationalists), who also had relatively extensive paramilitary networks in Malaya after the Second World War, and who had already been in conflict with the MCP prior to the Emergency.

The remainder of the film (reel two) consists of intimate footage of the unit on a long expedition through deep jungle toward a Communist base, and features the display of captured weapons and communist flags from the base after it had been cleared. The film then records the journey out of the jungle, including a long sequence showing the unit being assisted down a fast flowing river by local Malays on precarious looking flat-bed bamboo rafts.

The film is a significant record of a poorly remembered war, and all the more valuable in that it records operations during the early development phase of jungle counter-insurgency operations in Malaya. For Clutterbuck, the British were at this stage ‘undoubtedly losing the war’ (op. cit., 55.), and the period covered by the films seems to have been notably unsuccessful. Actual contacts with the enemy were infrequent, kill rates were low, and the MCP remained well supplied. Clutterbuck notes that the figures supplied by Oldfield, in his account of the Green Howards engagements in Malaya during late 1949, indicate that for four months between September and December ‘the battalion, toiling through the jungle, saw the guerrillas just five times, lost one man, and killed one guerrilla’ (op. cit., 54; emphasis in original). Something of this futility seems indicated by the film: notwithstanding Major Rhodes James’ recollection that a handful of Communists (‘three or four’) were killed during the operations filmed here, two hand-stitched flags and a couple of guns seems a truly paltry haul after the disproportionate effort and energy evidently expended on the exercise.

Of perhaps more importance is the first section of the film, and the commentary is of particular interest. The section, showing the removal of villagers from Bukit Kachi, can be taken to show the detention of squatters under Gurney’s original Emergency Regulations, quite possibly ER17D. At this stage of the war, before the Briggs plan and its change of focus, the ‘Communist Terrorists’ or ‘CTs’ of post-Briggs propaganda were not yet a clearly defined enemy (on this, see Harper op. cit.: 151-2). The lack of a clear line between peasants and insurgents found reflection not only in punitive Emergency Regulations, but in the conceptual instability that simultaneously identified the squatters as organised Min Yuen who give away the soldiers every move, simple peasants controlled by Communist coercion, and straightforward victims of Communist terror. That they were variously all these things did not help matters, and one consequence of the Briggs plan was that physically removing them wholesale from their geographically and socially liminal position on the jungle frontier solved both the conceptual and strategic problems of where exactly the enemy was and how they were to be dealt with.

But prior to the clarity brought by the relocation of half a million souls to the barbed wire compounds of the ‘New Villages’ documented in films such as the Malayan Film Unit’s A New Life– Squatter Resettlement of 1951, the conflict was a much muddier and inconclusive affair. The Rhodes James film is evidence of this, as military operations against organised MRLA forces blur into police-led collective reprisals against whole villages, and the same villagers that ‘had to do what they were told’ are in fact all in the jungle with the guerrillas. In this extraordinary and revealing film, the fruitless early stage of this messy war unfolds before us as a silent and intimate portrait of toughened young men, Nepalese, Chinese, Malay and British, travelling interminably through the sun-dappled darkness and heat of the deep jungle toward the violent but minor confrontation that is the absent fulcrum of the footage.

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